I'd leave it too, you mentioned eventually coated in grass, right now it has a +10 VISIBILITY for field crashes.

It will look even cooler as it scrapes away due to crashing, giving it a distressed look.

I’ll hafta see what actually happened and that will determine where I go from here- if it actually pulled up the color, then it’ll have to come off so it doesn’t flake away every time I touch it.

I don’t think it actually pulled up the color though- I think it was “clearcoatphobic” (I made up that word) and the clear coat just gathered up in areas.

I’m still mad at it so I’m not gonna look at it until tomorrow.

Edit- for now, I’m gonna call this, “Bando camo”.

Is this pic after you sanded it down?



If so, I think it looks really good man and a heck of a save from all that clump!!  I know zero about hydro dipping but have watched youtube videos.  It looks like you need a really steady hand bringing it out of the soup.

As someone who goes out of their way to color match their motors, standoffs, camera, and VTX antenna, I appreciate the vibrant colors its freeging crazy looking lol.  It's like Skitzo style  

Nope, that was a picture I took right before clear coating just in case it went horribly wrong.

The other picture is the after clear coat.

Edit- I don’t have steady hands. You don’t want to bring it back out through the soup or you get overlap and general crapness- I blow the “soup” to the edges or use some paper to pick up enough paint so that I have clean surface water to pull it back up through.

Have a cold beverage of your choosing. Relax. Sleep on it.
Tomorrow, do minimal work to get it in an "assembly" state.
Put the frame together and see what it looks like.

You know, there will be wires on the arms, battery on top, and
a bunch of other stuff that will basically "cover up" a lot of it anyway.

Personally, I kind of like the "rough" look, but that is just me. 

We are currently experiencing another atmospheric river. If you’re not familiar with that, basically, the sky sucked up a whole bunch of water from the Pacific Ocean and is now dumping it on me. Buckets of water, local flooding, landslides, etc.

I’m always homesick, but crap weather like this makes it worse. I miss Southern California. I miss being able to have a motorcycle as my only mode of transportation. I miss my old stomping grounds from Long Beach to Downey, Whittier, and Montebello. I really miss Arturo’s Puffy Taco.

Anyhow, yeah, lots and lots of rain. I don’t mind flying in the typical Pacific Northwest rain, but when it’s coming down hard enough that if you step outside you’re completely drenched in seconds, it’s just not safe. An entire bottle of conformal coating isn’t gonna make it a submarine…. or would it? As long as there was some water cooling… hah, get it? My apologies, I’ve had a few drinks.

Thanks to the buckets of water, tonight was a build night instead of a fly night.

I started sanding down a section of this frame that I needed level with 1000 grit sandpaper, and I started getting a distressed look. I was like hey, this isn’t so bad. Then I was like hey, y’all are right, this is intended to be a basher- I don’t need to spend time sanding things down when my crashes will do it for me.

This hydro dip was a fail all around- I tried out a new primer and a new clear coat- both failed. You can see from the pictures after sanding that I didn’t get good adhesion with the primer. If I had, you wouldn’t see all that carbon fiber showing through. The clear coat- I don’t want to talk about it, it was awful.

I’ve moved on to the build stage of this, because yeah, I’m gonna crash a lot, paint is gonna chip, and it’s gonna get covered in “fresh cut grass green”.

If you like builds to be color coordinated, now is a good time to look away. The frame is color coordinated, but once I added the motors it is full on color vomit. Those racewire LEDs are green, because that’s what I had.

I kinda dig it. I wish I could have kept the original dip pattern, but, next time.

Hi Lemony,

Well, personally, I like it. Looks Very COOL    Sort of kaleidoscope 

Some slow progress. My 5v cam wire broke while I was soldering my motor wires- I’m glad, cause I’d much rather find the weak points during assembly than while flying.

Harry- thanks! I was really struggling with how this thing looked after everything went wrong.

Hi Lemony,

That build is really looking SUPER COOL    
See, it is all coming together nicely. GOOD JOB 

That is psychedelic man!!  Are you gonna dip the other 4 standoffs?  Those front two look sick.  Please PLEASE take the drone porn shots before maidening it.  And if you are cool with it, please send me some hi res pics I'd love to add it to the "In The Wild" section on the About page of my site.

Thanks!

I’m not going to dip the rear four standoffs, they actually match pretty well with the yellow. The front two standoffs weren’t going to be used, they got dipped because they were holding frame parts together during the dip- but I had 4 yellow/gold 20mm stand-offs (rear), and 2 25mm orange standoffs that just didn’t work at all for the front.

I’ll take plenty of pics and send you some hires ones prior to its maiden flight- it’s not going to look near as slick as I wanted it to because I’m just leaving the bunched up clear coat anywhere that I don’t need level. But it will definitely be unique, and between you designing it like a tank and the jacked up paint job, I definitely won’t be afraid to crash it.

You should do a post of your hydro dip work man I'd be curious to see what else you've dipped. If there is one already sorry I missed it!! (And link pls lol)

(06-Mar-2022, 08:01 PM)the.ronin Wrote: You should do a post of your hydro dip work man I'd be curious to see what else you've dipped. If there is one already sorry I missed it!! (And link pls lol)

Ronin-

Source one- see page 1. This one ended up being Xmas themed.
https://intofpv.com/t-rdq-source-one-v3

Micro Alien- see page 1.
https://intofpv.com/t-impulserc-micro-al...4%E2%80%9D

Sector25CR- see page 3. This was my first attempt at hydro dipping. It turned out… interesting. I thought I could just use my pre-thinned acrylic airbrush paint, but it just sunk to the bottom of the water, so I raided my significant other’s stash of nail polish and used that. I later learned that I can use acrylic paint, but first I need to heat up the water and dissolve some cornstarch into it to increase the viscosity of the water.
https://intofpv.com/t-roma-f1-hgrlc-sector25cr-builds

The ongoing theme with all of these is struggling to find a good clear coat.

The physical part of this build is complete. Software setup and maiden flight will hopefully happen Wednesday evening.

I had planned on zip tying the cap to the back of the standoff that my power cable is strapped to, but the vtx got in the way (…and I trimmed the wires a little too short anyway. Even though I always measure three times before making a cut, I still manage to screw it up- this is why I don’t try to build pretty things out of wood. Functional I can do, pretty, no) so it got strapped to the top of the vtx.

I had to get a little creative with the vtx antenna mounting- because it’s coming out the rear of the vtx right by the rear standoffs I wasn’t able to use the tpu vtx antenna guide that ronin sent me. If/when that antenna breaks I’ll rotate the vtx 90 degrees and use a 90 degree antenna connector- that should give me enough play to use the antenna guide without straining the wiring.

I dusted off my 3d printer and printed some landing skids out of PLA (PLA and PETG are the only filaments I’ve ever managed to print successfully in). 

Semi-unrelated side note: this is the first time I’ve successfully printed on a glass bed. I bought my first glass bed two years ago, and after months of frustration I hit it with a sledgehammer so that I would stop wasting time on it. I couldn’t get proper adhesion no matter what I tried- Painters tape, glue stick, numerous hairsprays, every possible combination of those in different ratios… I ended up buying another glass bed a few months later, tried it one more time, failed, and it’s been sitting in a box for the last year plus. Decided to try one more time and it worked great- apparently all I had to do was either let the hairspray dry overnight or let my bed preheat until the hairspray became invisible. It would have been cool if that had been mentioned in any of the hundreds of tutorials I’ve read in the past.

It comes in at 178g dry. There’s a lot of places I could shave off weight if I wanted to, but I wasn’t trying to keep this light. It could come in under 250g with a small battery, but I’m just gonna slap my FAA number on it so I can use my usual 4s 850mah batteries. If/when remote ID becomes a thing, all of my quads will be going on a diet.

I think I’m going to try setting up dynamic idle for the first time on this. I just need to decide if I want to just use Chris Rosser’s chart or actually figure out the minimum idle for each motor.

Niiicceee!!! I am so far liking the RCinpower 1204s I've got on my 2.5". Impressive little motors.